Cyberpl@y

Communicating Online

Brenda Danet

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859734247
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Public Communication Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

The Internet is changing the way we communicate. As a cross between letter-writing and conversation, email has altered traditional letter-writing conventions. Websites and chat rooms have made visual aspects of written communication of greater importance, arguably, than ever before. New communication codes continue to evolve with unprecedented speed. This book explores playfulness and artfulness in digital writing and communication and anwers penetrating questions about this new medium. Under what conditions do old letter-writing norms continue to be important, even in email? Digital greetings are changing the way we celebrate special occasions and public holidays, but will they take the place of paper postcards and greeting cards? The author also looks at how new art forms, such as virtual theatre, ASCII art, and digital folk art on IRC, are flourishing, and how many people collect and display digital fonts on handsome Websites, or even design their own. Intended as a time capsule documenting developments online in the mid- to late 1990s, when the Internet became a mass medium, this book treats the computer as an expressive instrument fostering new forms of creativity and popular culture.

1
Introduction

This book is about playfulness in communication on the Internet in the mid to late 1990s. The cover of the book is a fine example of play with digital typography, one of the central topics of the book. An @ (“at”) symbol, ubiquitous in email, has been substituted for the letter “a” in the title. By 2001 this had become a commonplace in discourse relating to the Internet. Note also that the title is surrounded by 10 “smileys,” little icons composed of clusters of typographic symbols. Only the first one in the top row at the left is likely to be familiar to some readers - a “wink” composed of a semi-colon, a dash and an end-parenthesis - though it is far less commonly used online than the basic smiley (smiling face) composed of a colon, a dash and an end-parenthesis. If you are unfamiliar with these icons, tilt your head toward your left shoulder and you should be able to see the wink. The rest of these clusters of symbols are typical of humorous collections of smileys that have circulated on the Internet for 20 years, but are not much used in communication on the Internet.¹ If you happen to dislike smileys, don’t put this book aside. It is about much much more than these symbols.

In the past we often encountered play with typography in advertising, as in the name of the chain of toy stores, TOYS R US with the R backwards. In such contexts, signage was typically rendered in what professional typographers and designers call a display typeface. The texts of scientific prose and newspapers, on the other hand, were set in text typefaces - those that enhance readability and legibility, that appear to be “transparent.”²

In the late 1990s, developments in online communication and culture increasingly blurred the boundaries between genres of communication in which play with typography and spelling was conventionally practiced and those where it was not. There was a riot of experimentation with typography on the Internet and in relation to computers. For instance, as we will see in Chapter 7, people without formal training in design or typography became “fontaholics,” collecting and displaying their favorite fonts on the World Wide Web, and even designing their own.

Texts that had long been published in sober black and white were bursting into color. Thus, in the fall of 1997, the New York Times introduced color into its pages, in advertisements and photographs. Around the same time, emailers who had formerly been restricted to black and white plain text began to send each other graphic and sound files as email attachments, and to vary the size and shape of fonts and even font color in messages.

The @ symbol, which replaces the letter “a” in my title, has been a standard component of all email addresses since 1972, when an engineer called Ray Tomlinson chose it to separate the names of users from the machine where their accounts were located (Hafner and Lyon 1996:191–192). The history of this symbol is an intriguing microcosm of developments in the history of writing. It migrated from medieval scribal calligraphy to 19th-century handwriting to the typewriter, and finally to the computer keyboard. It may have begun as a medieval ligature or contraction of the Latin ad, (“to, toward, at”).³ In the 19th century it was used in cursive, commercial handwriting to represent the notion of “price,” as in “3 apples @ 10 cents an apple”.⁴ Eventually, it became a standard feature of the typewriter keyboard, and was pronounced “commercial A” or “commercial at,” in English, French, Italian and Russian. Today, @ is one of the 128 7-bit ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters in digital plain text, which are used in communication between all types of computers, regardless of operating system.⁵

In the 1990s typographic characters became central expressive symbols of emergent cyber-culture, as in the title of a novel, back slash: a cyber thriller.⁶ On the jacket, the title was set in all lower case, a common practice in textual communication online. Another popular symbol was the ubiquitous “smiley” icon:-), a sideways smiling face⁷ composed of a colon, dash and end-parenthesis, often used in online communication to indicate a smile or that one is joking. Thus, in 1998 the Wells Fargo Bank promoted its online services with a paper prospectus containing a giant smiley. The continuing popularity of smileys drew on that of the conventional “happy face”:). The @ symbol was the most popular of all. We saw it everywhere, online and offline: on T-shirts, in online and print journalism and advertising (e.g., a Gap ad for children’s clothes containing the expression gap@school) and in book titles (e.g., [email protected] by Donna Haraway),⁸ as well as in the logos of many cybercafes (Figure 1.1). The second example in Figure 1.1 is particularly clever: @ is vocalized as strudel in Hebrew;⁹ thus, the name of this Jerusalem Internet café and wine bar cleverly unites strudel the cake and its rolled shape with the Internet and the double functions of cybercafes.¹⁰

Figure 1.1. Logos of three cybercafés.

Expressivity was particularly evident when @ was substituted gratuitously for the plain letter “a,” or when the symbol was graphically over-large. The cover of the program of a 1997 conference in performance studies featured a huge@symbol. In December, 1998 the Swatch Corporation, makers of stylish watches for young people, announced the arrival of @ Internet Time, a global time something like Greenwich Mean Time.¹¹ Internet time was represented on its Website as, e.g., @634, for the 634th “beat” in an Internet day containing 1000 “beats.” Other examples were Cyberst@tion, the Internet department of the branch of Waterstone’s bookstore opposite University College, London, and meg@, the Saturday youth supplement to the London Times. Gratuitous uses also occurred in other languages. F@ites de l’Internet was the title of an evening of programs broadcast on the French-German Arte cable television channel on March 19, 1998.¹²

Subject of the Book

As my title indicates, this book is a series of studies of playfulness in communication and culture on the Internet. Its focus is on play with form of various kinds in online communication. Quite a few authors, e.g., Michael Heim (1987), Jay David Bolter (1991), Richard Lanham (1993), Sherry Turkle (1995), Allucquère Rosanne Stone (1996), and Malcolm McCullough (1996), comment generally on the playfulness of the medium. The approaches of these authors are philosophical (Heim), literary (Bolter, Lanham), or otherwise treat the medium in a general, mainly non-empirical manner (Stone, McCullough). Sherry Turkle’s (1995) Life on the Screen, Identity in the Age of the Internet is an empirical study but deals with play with identity, not with the new medium per se, and she focuses primarily on psychological, rather than cultural, social or linguistic aspects.

Two book-length studies of the language of online communication are Murray (1991) and Davis and Brewer (1997). Neither is about playfulness. Some post-1995 articles and book chapters that are reviewed below¹³ do focus on aspects of playfulness with the medium. However, to my knowledge, this is the first detailed, empirical, book-length study of specific forms of playfulness, focusing primarily on actual messages exchanged in specific settings. Moreover, this is the first book to accommodate linguistic, typographic and multimedia phenomena within the same theoretical framework. I am interested both in linguistic/textual (Chapters 2 and 3) and visual-graphic and multimedia phenomena (Chapters 4–7).

The title of the book also reflects the spirit of adventure, fun and experimentation that accompanied explorations in a new medium, and the ways that it shook up old norms and expectations. Millions of serious email messages were sent and received every day, and people wrote serious articles and books with word-processors. At the same time, play with writing was distinctive enough and frequent enough in the many modes of this new medium as we approached the millennium to warrant a book-length treatment.

Online communicators played with many other aspects of communication besides language and writing, including their own identities, the frames of interaction and the conventions of pre-digital genres of communication. The visual “look” of communication on the Internet became increasingly important, not only on the World Wide Web, but also in other modes. For example, mIRC, a Windows 95-based version of the IRC software, enabled players to vary the color of both the font used during chat and the background of the chat window. Moreover, players could now incorporate colored images and sound in their messages. Chapter 6 is a case study of two IRC channels that specialized in primarily visual communication.¹⁴

The late 1990s also saw the development of a variety of chat modes incorporating a graphical interface. Thus, in “The Palace” players chose visual avatars to represent themselves, or even designed their own, and could add virtual props to enhance their online identities.¹⁵ While players could animate their avatar if they had the skills to do so, the graphic background of “The Palace” was static. Like the Palace, “Dreamscape” and “Vzones” offered a third-person perspective on a two-dimensional world.¹⁶ By mid-1999, another company, Worlds, Inc., offered a dynamic, three-dimensional graphical interface with music.¹⁷

In The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, Sherry Turkle (1984) had suggested that computers serve as important “objects to think with” - evocative objects for thinking through questions about who we are. In the 1990s the computer became a key cultural symbol and metaphor, and not just a medium for the transfer of information. With the rise of networks of computers which could exchange messages with one another, the computer became an expressive communica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 “Feeling Spiffy:” The Changing Language of Public Email
• 3 Typed “Jazz:” Writing, Play, and Performance on Internet Relay Chat
• 4 “Don’t Just Send a Card, Send a Cyber Greeting!” Digital Greetings on the World Wide Web
• 5 ASCII Art and its Antecedents
• 6 “Welcome to Our Beautiful World of Colors!” Art and Communication on Internet Relay Chat
• 7 “There’s More to Life than Times New Roman!” Font Frenzy
• 8 Concluding Reflections
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Names Index